People don’t have time anymore. If you try to make an appointment, they open their agenda and all you see is coloured blocks taking up all possible time slots up to three weeks in the future. If you try to agree upon a deadline, they sigh and say they don’t know when they can do it. If you’re unlucky, they will try to re-arrange their agenda and three hours later come back that it should be possible now. And still, you can be pretty sure that they will contact you a little later to do the same with your newly stated agreement. These people stress out but only get moving when the deadline has passed. But they’re so nice and kind to assure you that they added your questions or task to their never-ending to do lists.

It’s frustrating, not only for you, it’s also for them. Setting priorities, committing to deadlines, reserving time to handle unexpected things, … It almost seems that these people don’t want to have time. In my opinion, people grew a societal conscious that busy-ness is acceptable and appropriate behaviour… It became a strategy for people that want to feel important but in fact have little self-control and respect.

This kind of fake productivity kills more than you think apart from the fact that it annoys most of us. So let’s help them a bit.

There is a simple life hack that helps people to get their things done. It requires a little planning, some focus and most importantly no excuses. It’s called ‘Eat That Frog’, introduced by Brian Tracy. It focusses on doing stuff and the energy one gets out of it.

Firstly map what do you want/need to do? Use the important/unimportant metric to set priorities. And most importantly set the hardest task on top (eat that frog first and you will get energy. If you don’t, it will drain you).

Secondly, make it actionable. What needs to happen to achieve that goal? Do you prefer to take small steps (split up) or a big leap (block enough time) to finish a task at once?

Thirdly; Set deadlines for everything but don’t overload your planning with this type of work alone. Plan time for varia, relaxation, social connections, …

Run it through at the end of every day. In your sleep your mind does halve of the work so it takes less long when actually executing tasks with focus.

It helps if you look at it with three goggles; With the first goggles you focus on the next day solely. With the second one you focus on the next week upto ten days. With the third one, you look at your long term goals and planning.

Feedback is welcome. Feel free to share this with all procrastinators and fake productivity people you know. And if you’re not one, just like it 😉

Like this:

Yesterday a colleague of mine got stuck in the elevator. It’s great there is a phone so you can alarm the dispatching. But it would be even nicer that they can unlock a minibar so the time you spend stuck in an elevator would be nicer…

Sometimes you see to much on your phone what you don’t want the people around you to see. For text messages on iphone it’s possible to amend that but for most apps, you don’t control it. The notification scrambling app enables you to define whether you want to see the type of message, the sender and/or not the contents.

Like this:

It’s a modern, stylish purse or handbag where your cards, money, beauty and other stuff can be stored simple and you can find anything back by it’s screen on top that shows you in 3d where a specific card is located. While everything needs to be equipped with RFID tags, the purse itself can be located via an app or by simply whistling, than it returns a sound, so you can locate it.

This idea started out as a Home phone redirect app.I don’t want to have a home phone anymore but sometimes there are some advantages you can’t ignore. I call for free with my home number but I don’t have a phone to call with it. What would be nice is a home phone number that i can control via a dedicated app. It could turn on when I enter my house, and send me subtle notifications when I’m out of home.

It would be the start for accumulating all your phone numbers. Your office phone, your fax, your skype, your google hangouts, your home phone etc would be centralised in the app and with strict rules you control what number one can access between certain times, locations etc.